THE NEWS IN PRINT

For all of us who are interested in shows involving secret services, CIA, KGB and other government organisations taking different routes of spying is no stranger. Probably a lot of spying happens in the US, but we may never know if our government is spying on us or not. A few months back, news broke out that the US government had intentions of obtaining detailed information on all the laser printing that takes place. It was reported that Electronic Frontier Foundation had cracked a code that contained detailed information on the printing time and the serial number of the printer.

Spieker blog reports that they have identified one of these codes and more importantly decrypted it. Yellow saturation was increased all the way and the image was zoomed at 600% before printing to identify the secret code.

Here’s the observation from the code: In my example the code can be read by adding the sums of the dots per column, combined with the values on the left (the bottom line shows the results per column): printed on the 22nd day of the 11th month at 14:38. The blogger was unable to decrypt the serial number of the printer though.

These yellow dots might act as an information source to the government but indirectly helps people protect their work by watermarking them unknowingly. Or maybe, it helps organisations track employees’ printing patterns for personal use.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 6:24 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.